


Sorrows gather like great storms

by Thealmostrhetoricalquestion



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Freeform, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Not as depressing as tags make it sound, POV Stiles, Post-Nogitsune, Recovery, Sad Stiles Stilinski, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 13:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4437872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion/pseuds/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m always cold,” Stiles says, because that’s an easy truth. </p><p>“I’m always afraid,” Stiles says, and that truth is a little harder to say. </p><p>And Derek squeezes his shoulder and his hand is hot and heavy and the rain slides down the windows. And Derek sighs and says, “Me too.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorrows gather like great storms

**Author's Note:**

> This is very rough, and not my usual writing style. If I'm honest, I'm not sure that I like it, but it was just a quick fic really, and it mostly came from this little image i had of Derek and Stiles in the jeep, with the rain coming down around them, quiet and thoughtful, with Derek's hand over Stiles's lightening scars. 
> 
> But like I said, it's very rough. 
> 
> I hope you like it anyway, and please read the warnings, it's not the happiest of fics.

Sometimes Stiles spends a Sunday running for his life. The preserve is hot and the trees seem to stick together, blocking his way as he sprints and sprints and sprints, surrounded by Scott and Lydia and Kira. Sometimes he slips and the scrapes on his knees come as a sweet relief, even if it means another pair of jeans thrown out to pasture. 

Sometimes his thoughts race on a Monday. His hands tap on the desk and his teacher’s voice drones on and on and on and he’s left in the dust, open-mouthed and unable to speak, unable to raise his hand and ask for help. Sometimes the weight of food in his stomach holds him down, sticks him to the ground, and he has to relieve it, has to get rid of it, lighten the load. 

Sometimes, he can’t outrun anything. That’s what his life is, you see. It’s survival. And how do you survive if you can’t run fast enough to escape it, that dreaded black mouth opening up and swallowing him up, a great maw of darkness. The answer, quite simply, is that you don’t. 

On a Monday, much like any other Monday, the Nogitsune drags Stiles’ body out of his bed and walks it downstairs. It takes control, pushes Stiles’ hands off the wheel and grips it hard, sharp nails digging it and holding on. Stiles watches his Dad greet his body; greet the thing lingering inside his mind, blanketing him. He feels suffocated, but the Nogitsune is fine, speaking with Stiles’ voice and his scattered words, pretending to think the way that Stiles does. 

And it doesn’t have to pretend, not really, because all the information is here, quietly offered up on a lidless platter. The way it walks, talks, thinks, smiles, breathes, slips and trips- that’s all Stiles, but without Stiles. 

So on a Monday, Stiles’ body goes to school and Stiles keeps quiet in the back of his own head, curled up and crying. 

He sees flashes of faces through his own eyes, but he doesn’t control where they look, when they blink, what they see. He sees a flash of Lydia’s hair, a glimpse of Allison’s smile, the warmth in Scott’s eyes and he wants to scream. _Don’t look at me, it’s not me, this isn’t me._

Allison isn’t dead, not yet. She makes eyes at Isaac and she’s brave, so brave. Her hands shake on her bow but she still draws it, and that, that’s what makes her brave. 

Stiles is just an instrument, and the Nogitsune plays a sweet tune with his face and his hands and his sighs. Stiles wants to demand something sadder, something angrier, but he hasn’t got the fight, the bravo, the bravery. He’s a bow in the steady hands of a mad archer, and each arrow fired is a life lost. 

And then Allison is dead. 

And it all just stops. 

And Stiles is back, breathing shallowly, like he can’t believe his lungs are real, like he can’t believe they work when he asks them too. He has his whole mind now, a great big field of space and emotion, all for him, with nothing to share it. He uncurls and he wipes his eyes and he unwinds the bandages, and Allison is dead, and Scott has a hole in his heart that just won’t heal, no matter how many times the skin knits itself anew. 

Stiles stops sugar-coating things. On a Sunday, he runs for his life from the monsters and the pissed off creatures and the things that are drawn here, like moths to a flame, except Beacon Hills is a dank, dark place now, with no fire to speak of. On a Monday, he runs from his friends, the ones that look at him with madness and anger and guilt, because they don’t want to blame him, but the body was his and the face was his, and all of that action lies in his hands. 

Stiles remembers the way the blade twisted in Scott’s stomach, the crunch and snap and drag of metal through tissue and bone and flesh and skin. The slick blood that coated his hands like gloves, gloves that he can’t ever take off. He remembers the hard, cold smack of Kira’s head against the metal and he hates it, but the sound echoes in his head, much like a voice did once. He remembers the rain. 

He remembers the bomb and the arrow through Coach and the slam of the hammer against an anvil. 

He remembers Allison. Allison with her soft hair and her shining eyes and the way her shoulders dipped down after her mother died, the shadows under her eyes. Her smile, he remembers that. And he remembers her talent, and her slim fingers, and the way she looked at Scott and Isaac, and the way that they looked at her, not like she hung the moon but like she was the moon. She was the moon. 

_Was_ , not _is_ , because she died, and Stiles helped to kill her. 

A person can cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inactions. Stiles is guilty of both. His body acted and his mind did nothing, tucked away and tired and unwilling to fight, and helpless and hopeless, peering into the dark. 

Stiles peers into the dark now and he sees strange things. He sees red string unravelling and he sees the corners of Eichen House, dusty and unused corridors, fireflies lingering at the edges. He sees an animal masquerading as a girl, and maybe he could grow to like that girl, maybe he could draw the animal out, and love the girl, grow to love the girl. 

Or maybe he should grow to love himself, first. 

When it’s all done, all of it, over and done with- Stiles sits. He sits in his Jeep on the edge of a cliff with the trees near to breaking behind him. The rain pours down, buckets and buckets of water upended over the earth, and the wind is one long howl, rushing by and shaking the very core of the earth. It’s miserable and dark, and the clouds are black and his mood is black and there are lightening streaks all along his back. 

When it’s all done, Stiles sits in his Jeep, in the eye of the storm and waits until the noise is at its peak, loud and relentless, ruthless in its fury. He waits until he can’t hear his own voice, windows rolled down and doors opened up, engine running. 

And he speaks the truth. 

“Sometimes, I throw up at school.” It’s a start. 

“Sometimes,” And then it all flows forth, and his words are no longer dry and clinging to the cracks in his lips, but wetted by the rain and spilling out into the damp air. 

“Sometimes,” he says, “I just can’t eat. Because the food tastes different now, and I think about all of the food he ate when he was in my body, and the weight is too heavy. Sometimes, I wanna throw myself off this cliff. I reckon I could do it, y'know. Sometimes, I want to slice my skin up because someone else wore it. Sometimes, I think I hear his voice, but it’s just this echo, just a reminder, and I have way too many reminders.” 

He takes a breath because those are hard to come by these days, especially for some people. He takes a breath because Allison can’t, Aiden can’t. 

“I wish I had died, and Allison had lived,” Stiles says, voice trembling. He sucks in a breath and his hands shake and he feels a quiet kind of numbness spreading through him. 

There is a noise from the side of the jeep, a quick snick and slam, and Stiles knows if he turns around, Derek will be there, in the passenger seat. Derek is always there, even when Stiles doesn’t want him there. 

“I wish they had known it was me,” Stiles says, because if he stops speaking now, just because Derek is here, he won’t ever speak again. He won’t tell the truth again. 

“I’m sarcastic, and smart, and I knew something was wrong." All the words are slow and precise, because the truth is harsh and small and cutting, even when there’s no one around for it to cut. “I wish Scott had listened. I wish he hadn’t have been falling for Kira, and I wish he remembered to listen to me. Things might have been different.” 

There is a hand, suddenly, big and strong and steady. It settles on his shoulder, and Stiles shivers. There is rain plastering his clothes to his body and his hair to his forehead. His skin is soaked, but he’s no colder than he always is. 

“I’m always cold,” he says, because that’s an easy truth. 

“I’m always afraid,” he says, and that one’s a little harder. 

And Derek squeezes his shoulder and sighs and says, “Me too.” 

“I killed Allison,” Stiles says. He swallows, because that’s not quite right, and maybe after a few more storms he’ll be able to say it, the whole truth about it, about who really killed Allison, but right now he doesn’t deserve that truth. 

“I’ve killed a lot of people,” Derek murmurs, and Stiles wonders who he means, because he knows that it’s true, but he doesn’t know which people Derek means, and really, that makes all the difference, doesn’t it? 

“It doesn’t matter,” Stiles says quietly. And that’s a new truth, one he hasn’t thought of before. Of course it matters, why wouldn’t it? He has to fix it, or redeem himself, or find a way to forgive people, forgive himself. 

And then he shakes himself, and he looks out of the window, and he knows why it doesn’t matter, looking out at this storm. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he says again, quietly, with resignation, with weariness. Derek squeezes his shoulder, his hand hot and heavy against Stiles’ cold skin. “We just have to keep going.” 

Derek probably smirks. Or quirks an eyebrow. Or shakes his head. Stiles doesn’t know, because he doesn’t look, because he’s too busy realising something. 

_What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter. The world keeps turning. It spins and the tide flows in and out and the rain pours down and makes everything look miserable. There are still things to do and people to kill and people to save and monsters to make and dream up and fight. And it doesn’t matter if you do this thing whilst you’re scared shitless, whilst you’re crying so hard that you can’t see, whilst you’re laughing, whilst you’re remembering and screaming and praying and cheating, it just doesn’t matter. You still have to do the thing. The world doesn’t wait for you._

This is a truth he won’t say, not yet. Maybe not ever. 

“Winston Churchill?” Derek says, and his smirk is real and so is his hand and Stiles feels a kind of heavy that isn’t a bad kind, for once. The lightening streaks across the sky like arrows, silver arrows and Stiles sits in his car and thinks about school, and his Dad, and Scott and Allison and Derek. 

It doesn’t matter, he thinks, but he says, “Shut up.” And he smirks right back.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it, comments and kudos are very much appreciated!


End file.
